A good friend of mine retired from the US Air Force after 20 years of service. To celebrate, he held a huge open house and asked me to cook pulled pork for the event. After scouring the internet for some guidance, I determined that for the number of guests expected we should plan for ~60lbs. of pork butt (pre-cooked weight). We ended up purchasing a whole case of pork butts at the local grocery store. That equates to 8 pork butts, totalling 65 lbs.

I knew I didn’t have all I needed for preparing these to go on the cooker, so I picked up a large container of Bad Byron’s Butt Rub. This stuff turned out to be very good. I’ve read about it for a long time but just discovered a local source and I was really pleased with it.

I also knew that I didn’t have enough space on my Big Green Egg to get the job done without doing multiple cooks over multiple days. So, I borrowed a second large BGE from a neighbor, some accessories from some good friends, and still had to press my gas smoker into service at the last minute since I needed the space.

I had a little help in the preparation of the butts, but oddly the guys were nowhere to be found while I tended the process overnight. The BGE’s rocked along on a single load of lump chacoal and really took no effort at all (as I expected). However, the gas smoker had to have an LP bottle swap at about 4:30am, as well as water added to the drip pan at least twice overnight. If it hadn’t been for the need to use the gas smoker due to the volume of butts, I’d have gotten a whole night’s sleep.

Meat came off the cookers at about 8:00am. This was way sooner than expected. I was expecting something more like 10:00am-12:00pm. This was a concern because the party wasn’t to start until 3:00pm. I double-wrapped the butts in heavy duty aluminum foil and stuck then in a large cooler. I’m amazed at how hot the cooler stayed. I stuck a probe in one of the butts on top and it was still at 175 degrees when we tooke them out of the cooler to pull them at 2:00pm.

Unfortunately, the rain we had early in the evening kept some folks away so we ended up with more meat than needed. On second thought, maybe that’s a good thing! 🙂 Based on the feedback that I received, everyone really enjoyed the bbq and the fact that it was a departure from the typical burgers and dogs at a party this size.